'If you
live in Texas, California or Puerto Rico, and you want to watch Spanish
language television, it’s hasta la vista,
baby.'

Now,
a vitriolic jab
at sultans of satelliteConsumer group
attacks lack of local carriageBy David Everitt

Some of the issues in satellite broadcasting can get
pretty tedious if you’re not a fan of bureaucratic wrangling.There’s the must-carry
debate, for one, which would force DBS providers to carry all or none of
the local stations in any given market.
Then there’s the satellite
industry’s opposition to Northpoint Technology’s Broadwave, which
would offer an alternate, ground-based transmission system.Not exactly
soul-stirring controversies on the face of it.
But a new organization now
tells us that, behind all the bureaucratese, there’s a crucial concern
for the public.The satellite
industry is cynically refusing to carry 11,000 local stations, depriving
many Americans of vital TV services.
That was the theme last Tuesday of
the first press conference for EARN, an acronym that stands for Equal
Airwaves Right Now.
Executive director Peter Pitts is pretty pugnacious
about it all."This amounts to
satellite road rage," says Pitts.A lack of
local-station carriage, he argues, would make it difficult for consumers
to get information on school closings, road conditions and local political
debates. Among those channels that satellite will not deliver, Pitts says,
would be "Spanish language stations, African-American-oriented
stations, religious programming and almost all public TV stations. Over
two-thirds of local stations will be left behind by the satellite
companies." By inference, local advertisers would also suffer. Exactly how are EchoStar
and DirecTV doing this? Basically, in two ways, EARN contends. The first has to do with
the must-carry issue. Since DBS providers won’t be able to pick which
stations they’ll carry within a particular market, they’ll choose to
carry local signals in only the most lucrative, big-city markets, even
though, Pitts says, they have enough spectrum to serve rural areas as
well. The second has to do with the
satellite industry’s opposition to Broadwave, which, according to EARN,
could provide affordable local service to underserved areas."The satellite
sultans are acting without any thought to the public interest," says
Pitts.A new satellite
technology called spot beam will allow EchoStar and DirecTV to customize
their services to suit local needs, but Pitts is not optimistic about its
impact on local-station carriage."The spot
beam solution is a joke," he says, asserting that the satellite
companies will focus the spot beams only on major markets.
"If you
live in Texas, California or Puerto Rico, and you want to watch Spanish
language television, it’s hasta la vista, baby." Satellite-industry
observers agree with some of EARN’s points but differ with others. As for the basic contention
that DBS providers are focusing more on urban markets as opposed to their
original target of rural, underserved areas, Mike Goodman, an analyst at
the Yankee Group, sees this as a natural business evolution. "In urban and
suburban areas, the satellite companies needed to offer local stations in
order to compete with cable," he says. "It’s unrealistic to
think they would focus only on rural markets." But analysts tend to
agree with the satellite industry position that it doesn’t have enough
spectrum capacity to offer all local stations across the country. In fact,
observers maintain that EchoStar and DirecTV would probably be able to
offer more local stations in more areas if they did not have to comply
with must-carry. The idea is this: If DBS
companies have to carry all 25 local stations in the New York City area,
then they’ll have significantly less capacity to carry smaller-market
stations. But if they can carry, say, only the top-four network affiliates
in each market, then they’ll be able to cover more areas."There are
bandwidth constraints," says Adi Kishore, another Yankee Group
analyst. "The satellite industry makes it sound worse than it is. But
conversely, the other side tries to make the capacity seem greater than it
really is." Currently, the satellite
industry is making an appeal to overturn the must-carry rules, but as
things stand now, "The DBS companies need a certain number of subs in
a local market to make local-station carriage worthwhile," says Jim
Stroud, a Carmel Group analyst. He speculates, though, that the proposed
idea of EchoStar and DirecTV sharing transponder space could make it more
practical to transmit local signals. When it comes to EARN’s
proposed solution–the FCC approval of Northpoint’s Broadwave system–another issue comes up. During the course of the EARN press
conference, Pitts not only advocated Northpoint’s system, but also
invited Northpoint president Sophia Collier to make her case.
Questions
from reporters indicated that some wondered whether this conference might
be a sort of Broadwave rally."Broadwave is
a solution," Pitts said. "We support any technology that
brings broader access to the public."